The education is hugely important, as a previous speaker suggested. What happens for anybody in this industry, the medical industry itself, is “see one, do one, teach one”. I was the founding member of Canadian Cannabis Clinics. The next doctor to come along who wanted to work with me, or in one of our adjoining clinics or nearby clinics, I trained. I made recommendations about how they could get the rest of the training they needed. The training of doctors for medical cannabis is not happening in medical schools, you're quite right. They might learn about it as a botanical for an hour, but the teaching of treatment with botanicals is not part of our curriculum anywhere that I know of, other than India.
As for your question about the cannabis education program for military families, my initial reaction was like Dr. Shackelford's: Why are we doing this? What's the purpose of it? But I had a few more seconds than he did to think about it a little bit, and perhaps one of the thoughts behind this—again, I'd just be guessing—would be the same thing that many doctors do when they treat someone with any mental health issue. That is, they get a loved one into the office with them for all visits, because for any treatment employed, cannabis or otherwise, it's important for the loved one, the person in the household, to know about it.
I hate to take more time when you're all so strapped for it, but I would add that this was a really important thing I brought into my cannabis practice too. In a first follow-up visit, let's say, I would ask the patient, “What happened when you used the cannabis? How was your pain?” They'd say, “It was the same, Doc. It didn't work.” When I'd ask them how their sleep was, or their mood, they'd tell me that it didn't do anything. Then I'd look over at the spouse, and the spouse would be smiling.
So I would address the spouse about their husband or wife, or whatever the case was, and say, “They didn't seem to have a very good response, but your face kind of belies that. What's going on?” I would hear things like, “She's now back to doing the laundry; I don't have to do it anymore” or “He's down in the workroom. He hasn't been down in the workroom in two years. He's back doing his woodworking again.” I can't tell you how many times I had something like that happen.
People are expecting from cannabis medicine something just a little bit different. If you teach the most significant other in the family about it, that is pretty important, as is telling them the facts about cannabis and rolling out the truth about its risks and benefits. For instance, people don't have to be afraid of second-hand smoke. They won't go crazy or psychotic. A lot of people have sucked in a lot of the nonsense about cannabis—the lies, the exaggerations, the hazards. It wasn't very long ago that officials were saying that if you smoked cannabis, that was a gateway drug to mainlining speed or something else.